


Ohana - Summer Wind

by Calacious



Series: Ho oku i [4]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Established Relationship, Fluff, Kissing, Laughter, M/M, Ohana, recovering from an injury, song-inspired fic, team support
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calacious/pseuds/Calacious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny's recovering from an injury that nearly cost him everything, and he finally learns what ohana really means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ohana - Summer Wind

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song, "Summer Wind," by Emmy Rossum from the album, Sentimental Journey. Thanks go to suerum for hooking me up with the song.
> 
> hc_bingo: learning to be loved

Danny watches Steve from the safety of the shade on the lanai. It’s one of those beautiful days. The kind where Danny can see why Hawaii earned its nickname of Paradise – white, fluffy clouds beset in a baby blue sky, the ocean lapping at the shore’s edge with gentle waves, palm tree fronds swaying lazily in the breeze.

 

The sound of Grace’s laughter drifts from the water’s edge to where Danny is sitting on a lounge chair – resting as per doctor’s orders. His knee is wrapped, and he’s got a bag of ice resting on top of it, a bottle of beer dangling from the tips of his fingers.

 

Danny’s more relaxed than he’s been in a long time, and he knows that he has his team – Kono and Chin, just as much as Steve – to thank for that. There was a time, there, lying in an impersonal hospital bed, recovering from injuries sustained during a foot chase, when Danny had feared he’d lose everything that mattered most to him – Grace, Steve, his livelihood.

 

But, the team had come round him, refused to give up on him when he’d done his damnedest to push them all away because he hadn’t wanted to let them in. He’d been in too much pain, and hadn’t wanted to let them see him at his weakest. He’d had his pride to hold onto, and had thought that his pride was all that he’d had left.

 

There’d been talk of amputation if the infection, at the site of the surgery, couldn’t be controlled. It had been a devastating, life-changing event in his life. If Danny couldn’t walk, he couldn’t work, and if he couldn’t work, he couldn’t provide for his little girl, and if he couldn’t provide for his little girl, what use was he to anyone?

 

_Ohana._ It was one of those strange sounding Hawaiian words that Danny’d learned from watching a Disney movie with his daughter. Until recently, it had been just a byword to him. Unimportant, and without meaning, because it hadn’t really touched his life. Ohana had been a foreign word without definition to Danny.

 

Danny had gotten into the habit of smiling whenever Chin or Kono or even Steven had used the word and included him in the use of it, but it had never really impacted his heart, even when Steven had said that Danny and Grace were the only true ohana that he had left in the world. It wasn’t a word that moved him. Not like family – Christmases in Jersey spent gathered ‘round the Christmas tree while snow, clean and white, fell outside; watching baseball games with a countless number of cousins, their noses pressed to the television set; reunions in the city park with uncles and aunts Danny couldn’t even name…

 

Until recent events, when the concept of ohana was tested in ways that ‘family’ had never been tested in Danny’s life, it hadn’t been a real word to him. It had been nothing more than a cartoon word used by a cartoon kid for an inane audience lulled by artfully sketched palm trees that implied tropical breezes.

 

Now, though, Danny gets it. Steve, Grace, Chin and Kono, hell, even Kamekona, are ohana. Ohana isn’t just family; it’s more than that. Ohana had seen Danny through hell and it was well on its way to seeing him to the other side of it.

 

Grace lets loose a shrill scream that makes the hairs on Danny’s arms stand up. Danny, heart pounding, sits up abruptly, eyes scanning the beach for his little girl. His knee throbs when he jostles the injury as he attempts to get up out of the lounge chair.

 

He curses when the bottle of beer – the first one that he’s been allowed to have in too many months to count – gets stuck in the chair, hindering his movements before it’s finally jarred from his fingers. The bottle rolls away, spreading the remainder of its dark amber contents over the concrete. Danny can’t seem to get his body to function properly in his panic, and perhaps that’s for the best, because not even a half a second later, the ear-splitting scream has become a peal of laughter.

 

Danny shakes his head, and presses his hand to his heart, chastising himself for getting so worked up over nothing – his just fears of the ocean and what its depths hold, notwithstanding, Danny knows that he can trust Steve. He settles back against the lounge chair, not yet ready to relax, because, while he trusts Steven with his little girl, Danny is still very much an overprotective, Jersey father.

 

_You can take a fish out of the water_ …Danny thinks, and he fumbles blindly for another bottle of beer in the cooler beside him, twisting the top off and tossing it into the pail that Steven had left on the lanai for trash. Taking a deep breath, he plucks the dispelled bag of ice from the ground where it had fallen. There’s a small puddle of water mingling with the darker stain of beer. Danny plunks the ice back into position on his aching knee, and sighs as it eases some of the pain.

 

When Grace’s laughter turns into a loud squeal of half-sincere protests, Danny allows himself to relax a little more.  He cups a hand over his eyes and watches Steve toss Grace high into the air. He bodily follows the elegant arch that his daughter makes as she flies through the air. Heart in his throat, Danny holds his breath.

 

Danny tells himself that he trusts Steve, the man’s a Navy SEAL for goodness’ sake, the man practically lives in the water, and Grace is safe with him. She lands in the ocean, several feet from where Steve is standing. There’s a spectacular shower of water when Grace lands, and Steve dives beneath the waves, his head popping up beside a sputtering Grace whose head breaks through the surface mere seconds before Steve’s does.

 

Both of them are sniggering now, and Danny can’t help but smile. Tension bleeds from his shoulders and he sags back against the chair.

 

Steve’s deep, rich laughter rings out loud and clear, carrying across the ocean to Danny. It’s a perfect counterpart to Grace’s light, trilling laughter. It’s something that Danny hasn’t heard before – Steven and his Gracie laughing together, two carefree souls at play in the ocean.

 

It brings to mind the spinner dolphins that Steven had pointed out to him on that very beach not long after Danny had first met the man. He’d been mesmerized by them at the time – their slender, sleek bodies dancing across the ocean waves like ballerinas. Their playful chitters had reminded Danny of giggles back then.

 

Steve pulls Grace into a hug and tickles her as she begs him to let her fly again. He says something in response, but it’s too low for Danny to hear. Danny allows himself to relax, takes a sip of his beer, and closes his eyes, knowing that Steven won’t let anything bad happen to Grace, and he tries not to picture tiger sharks lurking beneath the glinting surface of the waters.

 

Some indeterminable amount of time later, Danny is startled awake when a dark shadow blocks out the sun that had been just on the other side of his closed eyelids, giving him cheerful dreams of spending a warm day in the sun and sand with Steve.

 

They weren’t building sandcastles, or burying each other in the sand, but had been entertaining themselves in other ways where sand got into places that it shouldn’t, as it always did whenever one spent any time at the beach. The warmth that had seeped down through Danny’s skin, to his very bones, hadn’t been from the kiss of the sun across Danny’s tanned skin alone.

 

Something cold and wet drips on him, and Danny frowns as he wipes away the last vestiges of the dream from his eyes – _Steve’s lips, warm and papery like sand, lingering over his_ – to find a smiling, and sopping wet Steve standing over him, holding an equally wet Grace directly over her father. Both of them are shaking with suppressed laughter when Danny wipes at the salty water that’s been unrepentantly dripped on his chest, and glowers at them.

 

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” Steve says.

 

Grace giggles at Steve’s words, and wriggles loose from his arms when he leans down and brushes a kiss over a still scowling Danny’s lips. It isn’t at all like the dream kiss that Danny had been rudely wakened from, but as far as kisses go, it’ll do. It isn’t a prolonged kiss, because Grace is there, watching, and, though she knows about Danny and Steve being ‘boyfriends,’ they don’t want to push things too far or too fast with her.

 

Grace wrinkles her nose up with the same amount of disgust she reserves for when she’s witnessing her mother and Step-Stan kissing. She doesn’t understand what the big deal about kissing is right now, and Danny doesn’t want to disabuse her of the notion that kissing is something undesirable, no matter who is doing the kissing. 

 

All too soon, she’ll be of the mindset that kissing is a good, even desirable, thing, and then it’ll be Danny wrinkling up his nose, and Steven will have to be around to hold him in check, maybe even hold him back.

 

“C’mre, monkey,” Danny says, reaching out for his little girl who allows him to pull her to his side and he gives her the sloppiest wettest kiss that he can.

 

“Ew, Dad! You’re gross,” Grace says as she wipes it off and gives her father a look that has heretofore been reserved for cockroaches and maggots.

 

“That _was_ gross, Danny,” Steve agrees, and Danny beckons him closer.

 

Steve eyes him warily, but he leans closer, and, when he’s within reach, Danny lays the biggest, wettest, soppiest kiss on the man that he can. While Steve stares at him, flabbergasted, mouth opening and closing as speech fails to come to him, Danny pulls his daughter onto his lap, and proceeds to tickle her and pepper her with wet raspberries.

 

When Steve finally regains his composure, he helps Grace launch a counterattack against her father, and the three of them are soon nothing more than a laughing, wet, sandy pile of tangled arms and legs. The three of them are so engrossed in their play that they are unaware of the presence of the rest of their ohana until after Kono has snapped off several blackmail photos on her cellphone, one of which will end up becoming their family Christmas photo in a few short months.

 

It’s Kono’s fit of giggles, accompanied by Chin’s melodic laughter, and Kamekona’s loud guffaws, which finally alerts Danny to the fact that they are not alone, and he immediately sobers up. Steve and Grace follow him as soon as their own senses catch up with them.

 

Steve swallows and blushes as he looks away from the rest of his team. The look of panic that he shoots Danny is almost comical, but Danny takes pity on his partner, and snags Steve’s hand before the man can tuck it away into the pockets of his board shorts. Danny rubs his thumb across Steve’s knuckles, because he knows that it helps to calm the man, and he kisses the inside of Steve’s wrist, feeling the man’s pulse racing.  

 

“Quite the dog pile you had going on there bosses,” Kono says, when she manages to stop laughing and finally catches her breath.

 

She wipes at her eyes, and then proceeds to pluck up the bags of groceries she’d had the time to place on the lanai, before snapping photos. She heads to the kitchen, with Grace following close at her heels. She’s already asking Kono if she got any pictures. Danny and Steve groan simultaneously when Kono assures Grace that she’d taken choke photos of them.

 

Chin, after quirking his eyebrow at Steve and Danny, plops himself into the chair beside Danny, and pops open a beer. Danny pulls Steven onto his lap, unsettling the man, and causing him to make an unmanly sounding yelp. He glares at Danny, and settles beside him on the wide chair. Kamekona shakes his head at the three of them, muttering something about being surrounded by lolos, as he makes his way to the kitchen apparently the only place in the McGarrett-Williams’ home where sanity reigns.

 

Danny pats his hair into place, and settles back against the lounge chair, as though he hadn’t been caught cavorting like a little child mere moments ago, and clinks his beer against Chin’s. His beer is lukewarm, and it tastes a little like Danny imagines elephant piss might taste like, but he gamely swallows it down and then sets the bottle on the ground. He’s done with beer for the night.

 

The sound of friendly chatter and laughter floats in from the kitchen as Kono and Kamekona prepare Danny’s welcome home dinner, with Grace acting as a sous chef of sorts, and no doubt going through the candid photos that Kono had managed to take on her phone before laughter had given her away. Steve settles back beside Danny, wrapping his arm around Danny’s shoulders. Heat pours off the other man, in spite of the cool evening air, warming Danny.

 

Danny rests his head on Steve’s chest, and twines their fingers together. He’s missed this, being with his ohana. Usually, Steve, Chin and he would be right in the midst of it all, bumping elbows – Steve grilling burgers or steak or fish, Danny preparing the obligatory salad, though chips or fries were more his thing, and Chin whipping up some wicked side dish.

 

But this, kicking back with Steve, talking work and sports with Chin, is nice. This, Danny could get used to. Danny doesn’t even realizes that he’s fallen asleep until he’s being jostled awake in time to be ushered into the dining room – Steve and Chin on either side of him so that he doesn’t put any weight on his injured knee.

 

“Thanks,” Danny says, biting back his usual pride to allow his ohana to take care of him.

 

Being practically carried into the dining room goes against everything that Danny’s fought so hard for in his life, especially after his spoiled marriage to Rachel. He’d never wanted to depend on anyone for anything, ever again. Even now, after Steve’s endless nights spent at the hospital, sleeping beside Danny even when the man railed against him, Danny finds it hard to receive this gift of love and care freely offered to him by the man he loves and another man who has become like an older brother to him.

 

“Don’ mention it, brah,” Chin says quietly, squeezing Danny’s shoulder as he helps Steve lower Danny onto a dining room chair. “That’s what ohana does for each other.”

 

“Yeah, Jersey, now let’s get to the grinds before they get cold,” Kamekona says, clapping Danny on the back, before the tears pooling in Danny’s eyes have a chance to fall.

 

Shaking his head, Danny surreptitiously brushes away the tears, and everyone purposefully ignores him as food is passed around the table, and conversation is carried on around him. Somehow, more food than Danny can eat, finds its way onto his plate, and, when he looks up to find the culprit, everyone looks away.

 

As he surveys the table, there’s a part of Danny that wishes Kono hadn’t put her phone away, because this, right here, is what saved his life – ohana. If it hadn’t been for these five people, Danny knows that he wouldn’t be sitting there, right now, with too much food piled on his plate, tears brimming in his eyes.


End file.
